Erik Brown: “Paranormal phenomena, do they conceivably have a place in nature?”

A distinctive feature of my paper is that I explicitly accept that paranormal events, if they exist, very well could be scarce. Many phenomena may be rare, but for that reason they could very well exist. Just think about people being able to run from London to St. Petersburg in 24 hours, without for that reason being less real runners than they would have been, if there were many sharing that feature. In this vein I argue that the many errors which psychists are guilty of, do not affect the correctness of their best ostensible insights. Supporters of the existence of paranormal events have often made it too difficult for themselves in so far as they suppose that the acceptance of fairly marginal evidence for paranormal events entails major metaphysical shifts in our world view. We should rather stay content with investigating what we do have – reminders that sometimes mainstream science admits conspicuous additions to, rather than drastic rejections of our world view.